[R] RE: [Rd] too many arguments in foreign function call

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, Warnes, Gregory R wrote:

>
>   Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>   > Gregory R. Warnes <gregory_r_warnes at groton.pfizer.com> wrote
>   > >
>   > >I would like to create an R package that will depend on
>   > the ability to use
>   > >more than 65 parameters.  Would it be reasonable to expect
>   > this patch (or
>   > >something equivalent) to be part of , say R > 1.3.1 ?
>   >
>   > People are slow to upgrade, so you might be better off in the short
>   > run to somehow reduce the number of parameters below 65.
>   > For example,
>   > write a wrapper function that groups a number of scalar parameters
>   > into one vector.
>
> Actually, the whole point of the patch was to get out of this.  I want to
> keep the code as close to what was written by the original author and as
> simple as possible...


Sorry, but I don't see that.  You want to write the wrapper in R?  Why is
it not as simple to write it in C?  I really don't see the need to remove
the limitation in R (or even to have it as high as 65) since R now has
.External() which allows an unlimited list of arguments to be passed to C
code.  I can't believe that the natural R representation is 85 separate
objects, so the natural way looks like a C wrapper translating between R
objects and Fortran pointers.  You can even copy selectively.

The argument is that new code should probably be using .Call (if S
compatibility is relevant) or .External rather than .C, at least provided
that a C wrapper is feasible.  Those interfaces seem very much under-used.
(Including by me, for S3-compatibility reasons.)

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._